“I’m going to look up his articles. I wonder if he heard anything about the investigation or a grave while he was there,” I say.
“Maybe,” she mumbles.
I shower and step back into the living room to find her with her laptop open, the screen casting a white glow on her face.
“Well, it looks like Mr. Clay Porter doesn’t sleep much either,” she says.
Drops of water fall from the ends of my hair to the shag rug beneath my feet. I take two steps toward Mom and see that Clay has replied to an email she sent him moments ago.
I walk through the oncology unit. In my hands is a muffin from the cafeteria and two candles I found in the kitchen of our clinic. Marilyn, an interior designer, was admitted early this morning for abdominal pain. The admitting physician gives me an update and smiles at the muffin and candles in my hand.
The hallway smells like aluminum foil and gravel, like plastic packaging and a veterinarian’s office. Sometimes the scent hits me so strong that I spritz orange oil onto the inside of a face mask and keep it hanging around my neck.
Some of the patients smell it too. I had one patient whose taste buds had been decimated by chemo. Though she said everything tasted like cardboard, she couldn’t shake the metallic smell of the chemo coming from her own body. She washed her clothes as soon as she returned home from the hospital and showered twice a day out of desperation. One man told me his wife had started sleeping in a separate bedroom. She’d come up with some excuse to avoid hurting his feelings, but he’d overheard her talking to their grown daughter on the phone about his “cancer stink.”
“Knock, knock,” I say, standing in the doorway. Marilyn smiles as I enter. There are deep circles under her eyes.
“Hey, Doc,” she says.
“I heard you came in. How are you feeling?”
“Lousy,” Marilyn admits. “But not as lousy as a few hours ago.”
“That’s a start. You’re a little dehydrated too. But that bag of happy birthday fluids should fix that.”
There’s a linen tote bag on the chair, decorated with an image of a long-lashed woman wearing a bandanna on her head and boxing gloves for fists. Warrior is written in pink scrawl above the picture. She is a reinvented Rosie the Riveter, doing her part in this new war. I lift the bag and set it on the windowsill.
Marilyn’s war is ramping up. She’s just had a whole-body scan done, with positrons and electrons colliding in a crash of light. The wound is where the light enters, my father used to say, quoting Rumi. As if he knew about radioactive isotopes and imaging. Clouds of brightness on her images correspond precisely with spots where Marilyn has been having more pain—her left hip, the middle of her back, and her right shoulder.
She sighs and glances at her bag.
“Ah, what I would give not to have to be a warrior today,” she says. “I never even wanted to play dodgeball.”
“I don’t trust anyone who enjoys dodgeball,” I say, and she smiles weakly.
She looks wistful.
“Are you going to give me bad news today?” she asks.
“I’m going to tell you what your scan showed,” I say.
She listens. She looks frightened and angry and exhausted. She takes a breath. What she says next surprises me.
“Two months before my daughter was born, I painted her room carnation pink. It turns out her favorite color is moss green. She’s almost a teenager now, and I promised her I’d help her redo it how she wants,” she said.
And I know she will. Because when people have a reason to live, through some alchemy of the spirit, they make it happen. Warriors don’t wage war dreaming of immortality. They step into the fight assuming the posture in which they want to be remembered, like posing for a statue.
Even as Marilyn lies depleted on a stretcher, I can picture her stirring cans of paint and watching her daughter climb a ladder to reach the corners of her room. She wants to be her daughter’s mother forever, the mom who handed her brushes dipped in her favorite color, the mom who stood back and let her dress the world to her liking.
“I’ll talk to the rest of the team. Let’s see what we can do to get you home soon,” I say, and she nods.
I move mechanically through clinic, my head growing dense with pain as the hours pass. I shake another pill out of the little orange bottle and swallow it dry, wishing it were a different species of painkiller.
I sit at my desk and turn the computer on. The screen lights up, and I look away while I dim the monitor. My throat is parched, but I don’t get up. I find the website I need.
Lacey walks past my door.
“Everything all right, Doc?” she asks.
“Good as it gets,” I reply.
“All right. I’m headed out. I told you my idiot brother’s getting married, right? Tonight the families are meeting for the first time. The girl’s nice enough, but her parents think Obama is a closet Muslim and my boyfriend’s an actual Muslim. Wish me luck,” she says.
“Sounds like a good time,” I say, my eyes still navigating the screen. Lacey’s words hit me a second later and I look up.
“Wait, I mean, I didn’t know that,” I say. Why am I struggling to see Lacey dating anyone but a male version of herself? She must sense the regret in my voice.
“Of course you didn’t,” Lacey laughs. “You couldn’t know if I never told you.”
I wish her and her family good luck getting through this first dinner and watch her walk away, feeling embarrassed at the assumptions I’ve made.
I enter the numbers from my credit card into the website and submit payment. I print out a confirmation page and know there’s no turning back from this point.
I push my chair away from the desk and breathe. The office is dark and still, everyone having left long ago. My phone is quiet. I’ve not heard from Adam since I walked out of the restaurant, and part of me misses him. But a more rational part of me remembers that what I’m feeling is dressed-up loneliness. This is what I felt before I met Adam, when the scent of his cologne didn’t linger still on my sofa.
I cross avenues, feeling upside down, as if the earth has just flipped on its axis. My feet move quickly, buoyed by the momentum of the city. The heady scent of incense emanates from a man dressed in a red and yellow caftan. I walk past two women offering salvation in the form of a pamphlet and enter the dank train station. I close my eyes and travel in time.
When I was sixteen, Mom’s work took us to Bangalore, a city of blooming gardens and growing industry. We spent two days there as tourists. The equatorial sun blazed hot on our backs, and our clothes clung to our damp skin. Mom’s fingers stuck to the pages of the guidebook she’d purchased.
We ventured into a cave transformed into a Hindu temple guarded by monolithic pillars and enormous sun discs carved to honor Shiva.
Once a year, the guide had explained, and for no more than one hour, the rays of the sun fall between the horns of the Nandi and illuminate Shiva.
Did they design the temple that way? I asked the guide, a lanky man who seemed unfazed by the sweltering heat. Or did they discover the light fell that way after this had been constructed?
I’m not sure, madam. But I can tell you that it doesn’t matter one bit to the thousands who come each year to witness it.
Mom and I entered, our bare feet touching the cool, wet ground. I followed Mom’s footsteps, and strangers followed mine. We moved deeper into the dimly lit hollow, our backs hunched as the slope of the roof became more severe. I was bent in half, passing statues adorned with strings of marigolds and jasmine, when I felt my pulse quicken, my head grow light.
The guide’s words echoed in my ears.
Sometimes Shiva is depicted with a neck tinged blue from holding in his throat a churning poison gas that threatened to destroy the world. He has powers of destruction, but re-creation as well, as one cannot happen without the other.
I want to get out, I told Mom. The space was so narrow that she could barely turn around to look at my fa
ce. Mom made herself into a drill bit, clearing a path for me through the crush of tourists between us and the mouth of the cave.
I fell onto a bench outside the temple. Mom paid someone to slash open a coconut, and she forced a straw to my lips. I drank, wondering if the deities had driven me out of their sacred space. I’ve wandered into houses of worship since then, but never found a home in any of them.
I feel the rumble of the approaching train in my feet before I hear it.
When it arrives, I slip through the sliding doors and find my way to a seat. I stay on the train as it passes my stop. My mind does not wander. I am locked into this moment as I descend the steps and navigate the side streets to make my way back to Shair’s building.
I press the button next to his name. Nabi. I hold it down, my fingertip blanching.
A voice crackles over the intercom, a greeting I can’t make out. It doesn’t matter.
“Send Shair Nabi downstairs,” I shout.
Chapter 48
There is silence. My breathing is shallow and rapid. I dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I press the button again, a series of staccato buzzes.
There is noise over the intercom. I take a step back and brush my hair from my face. I stare at the elevator, expecting Shair to come charging out of it. I expect to face off against a soldier or a criminal, but when the doors open, the figure ambling toward me in the lobby is neither.
I look away so that I do not watch the struggle in his step.
He opens the glass door and joins me in the atrium. He squares off and meets my eyes—but only for a beat.
“Not here,” he says, then pushes open the outside door and steps onto the sidewalk. I hesitate, not wanting to follow a single command. I feel a hand on my elbow and jump back.
“What are you trying to do to him? Why didn’t you say who you were?” Shair’s daughter shrieks in Dari. Her eyes are puffy, as if she’s been crying. Behind her, standing in the elevator, is her mother. Tahera has grown round, heavy. The elevator door starts to close, and she lifts one hand to stop it, never turning her eyes from me.
She says nothing, just looks at me with the same hollow expression she had the night Shair deposited me in her care.
“This has nothing to do with you,” I tell his daughter in English, wresting my arm from her grip. I remember the moment I saw her wearing the clothes I’d outgrown, and my resentment bubbles up. She follows me out the door until she sees Shair standing with his hands on his hips.
“Go inside,” he tells his daughter.
“But, Padar—” she protests, shooting me a daggered look.
“Go, bachem. It’s me she needs, not you. Go be with your mother and your children. I didn’t finish feeding Elias.”
She slaps her arms against her sides, like a bird deciding whether to rise or retreat. Shair is right. I don’t need her. I turn back in time to watch him make a left at the end of the block.
“Don’t walk away from me!” I shout. He is already out of sight. I will not wait another day for my answers, even if it means chasing him down in the street. I catch up to him quickly, but he doesn’t bother to look at me.
“We will talk. But not here,” he says in Dari, his face stoic as stone. Fuming, I walk beside him. Because I cannot tolerate following his lead, I set my pace to be in step with his.
“Where are you going?” I demand to know.
“There is a place,” he mutters.
We walk a few more blocks. An elderly woman with a terrier on a leash smiles at us as she approaches.
“Stop playing games!” I say. I want to grab him by his shoulder and make him stop, but I can’t recruit my limbs to action. The woman pauses in her step, then frowns at me. She shoots Shair a look of pity before her dog pulls her away. “Just answer my questions. Did you kill them? Are you running from the truth? Why won’t you admit what you did?”
He still doesn’t pause. He crosses the bustling street, and a car horn blares.
“Stop!” I shout, to both him and the car careening toward him. The driver slams on his brakes, and Shair lifts one hand, a quiet apology. I am behind him then. I feel the heat radiating off the hood of the car, meet the bewildered gaze of the driver, and then jog to the opposite curb.
If I’m honest, I’ve probably dreamed of running him over.
We walk another two blocks. Shair’s breaths are heavier, labored. I can hear a faint wheeze as I walk with him.
“You will answer me today,” I warn.
Shair stops at wrought-iron gates, at a set of brick pillars that mark the entrance to a cemetery.
“Here,” he says before he trudges onward, through the entry. Cemeteries are their most honest selves in winter, when the trees are skeletal and the grass is yellowed and flattened against the cold earth. When anything that blooms announces itself as fiction, plastic. When loved ones say prayers in double time, quickened by cold gusts of wind.
Still, I’ve always found cemeteries settling—seeing the souls tucked in with their families, the tombstones carved with nicknames and finite dates, and the mounds of earth ready to catch tears. I think of Randalls Island and the people lucky enough to have been buried twice. Or the lifeless man buried in fresh flowers on the back of a truck in India, the vehicle escorted by swaths of people singing and beating drums. My grandmother’s jenaaza in Kabul had been a hushed, colorless affair, with whispered prayers and free-flowing tears blotted by handkerchiefs.
Just a hundred yards into the cemetery, the din of city traffic fades respectfully. The graves have all types of markers. We pass a memorial to the victims of the fallen towers, the tomb of Louis Armstrong, and a statue of a distraught woman in robes draped over a headstone. Other markers are far less conspicuous, barely an inch above the ground.
Shair cuts across the lawn and I stick with him, grass crunching beneath our feet. My low heels sink into the moist earth. He stops so abruptly that I almost walk into him. I immediately take two steps back and almost lose my balance.
The borders of this section are marked off with soaring trees. Standing a few feet ahead of a row of storied evergreens, Shair cups his hands in prayer. My eyes fall to the ground, to the stone pillow at the head of the plot.
Kareem Nabi.
From the dates carved beneath his name, I understand this is Shair’s son. Here lies the boy who, as a teenager, had seen my first blood.
“Aye, bachem,” he sighs. “May God forgive you and me both.”
He reaches over and brushes curled leaves away from the headstone. With a grunt, he gets on his knees and begins to pluck blades of grass around the edges of the stone.
“I kept him from war for as long as I could. I called in every favor. I begged. I threatened. I made promises I knew I couldn’t keep,” he says. My heart betrays me, pinching in my chest to hear a father mourn his son. I stuff my hands in my pockets and pull my shoulders back as Shair continues. “It was becoming impossible, and I was out of favors, out of money. I had to get him out.”
Shair tells me that he paid a smuggler to take his son to Czechoslovakia. Kareem was alone there, a teenage boy. It was two years before the rest of the family joined him.
“He was in a youth home. No one to look after him. All kinds of kids around him, plenty of them bigger than him. Older than him. He never told me what he went through there, but it changed him.”
These are the familiar stories of refugee families, who are sometimes driven piecemeal from their homelands.
“By the time we were together again, he barely spoke. My daughter, to this day, cannot bear to be away from her mother. My youngest,” Shair says, shaking his head, “he is too busy with his friends to make something of himself.”
A bird takes flight from an oak tree, soars above our heads, and lights on a nearby tombstone.
“What happened to Kareem?” I ask.
“When we came here,” he says, pausing to blow on his pale fingers to warm them, “I was the son and Kareem was the father. He learned En
glish quickly. He found odd jobs and impressed every man he ever worked for. He had the discipline of a soldier. He wanted to do more. He talked to a man who had a coffee truck. He was making good money. So Kareem used everything he’d saved to buy one.
“He woke at three o’clock in the morning, five days a week. Loaded his truck in the dark with doughnuts and whatever else people eat. He did this every day, until one day.”
Shair puts his palms to the ground. His face flushes with exertion as he pushes himself to stand.
“A man shot him for the few dollars he had in his pocket. Gone,” Shair says, his voice breaking. “They could not find his murderer. I couldn’t even seek revenge. In the end, I did the best I could and buried him here, where it is green and peaceful and close enough that I can pray over him.”
I fold my arms across my chest and watch my breath form a small cloud.
“May God forgive him,” I say quietly.
Shair looks infinitely grateful to me for this prayer, this small act of mercy.
“Do you believe in the seven ranks of heaven?” he asks, then chuckles. “Do you know that as they ascend, their gems increase in value? The second has only pearls, but the fourth has white gold, the fifth has silver, and the sixth . . . ah, the sixth dazzles with gold, garnets, and rubies! Even heaven is divided. Maybe the spirits of the dead are all too drunk on milk and honey to revolt.”
He lets out an exasperated breath that ends with a smoker’s wheeze.
“What can I say that will free you?” he asks, looking at me.
“Did you kill them?”
Shair presses the heel of his right hand to his temple, as if he’s suffered a direct blow to the head.
“You would be surprised how many fingers can fit on one trigger.”
“I deserve to know.”
“And a dying man should keep no secrets,” Shair concedes. “But are you ready to go back to those days? To that place?”
“How dare you ask me that?” I say, freshly outraged that Shair continues to dodge my question, even as we stand over Kareem’s grave. “You carved your son’s name into stone so that anyone who walks this way today, tomorrow, or a hundred years from now can read it and know he lived. You come, you pray, you lay flowers. It is evil to deny me this.”
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